On the eve of their 25th wedding anniversary, Mary Gooch's handsome husband Jimmy fails to come home. Mary wonders whether her size or her aversion to adventure chased him off. With few clues, she ventures to California in search of her husband. What she discovers is as shocking as it is delightful: a new vibrant energy--and an entirely different kind of hunger.
On the eve of their Silver Anniversary, Mary Gooch is waiting for her husband Jimmy -- still every inch the handsome star athlete he was in high school -- to come home. As night turns to day, it becomes frighteningly clear to Mary that he is gone. Through the years, disappointment and worry have brought Mary's life to a standstill, and she has let her universe shrink to the well-worn path from the bedroom to the refrigerator. But her husband's disappearance startles her out of her inertia, and she begins a desperate search.

For the first time in her life, she boards a plane and flies across the country to find her lost husband. So used to hiding from the world, Mary finds that in the bright sun and broad vistas of California, she is forced to look up from the pavement. And what she finds fills her with inner strength she's never felt before. Through it all, Mary not only finds kindred spirits, but reunites with a more intimate stranger no longer sequestered by fear and habit: herself.